Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Jonesing, in reply to Steve Barnes,
a thinly veiled suggestion that, in his opinion, Curran was being a loony and may prefer to belong somewhere else.
Or perhaps a werewolf, only really dangerous some of the time.
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Hard News: Jonesing, in reply to Hebe,
Could be a good thing, could be a bad thing.
If he’s polarizing, it’s either a good thing, or a bad thing. :-)
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Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to Stephen Judd,
I don’t really care. I might work at such a place, for example if it were clear that the actual people I worked with and for didn’t give a shit about the tests and it was just a foible of some mad HR manager.
You have to play the game, in a job hunt, regardless of the silliness of the game. Do the test, they're so damned unreliable that even if you do have something about you they want to find, they probably won't find it.
It's actually in some ways rather similar to the requirement of excessive qualifications, 99% of which knowledge will be irrelevant to the actual work. To teach high school maths, it's pretty much required that you've majored in mathematics nowadays, and yet you will not be teaching any university level maths to school students. It's as much a demonstration of commitment to the field as anything practical.
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Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
do you recharge by hanging out with friends or by having alone time? Is social interaction something that you reach a limit on relatively quickly?
Are these questions really about the same thing?
Like you say, it’s more a gradient than a binary, but I find it a broadly useful idea about how people work.
To be fair, the testing gives a score along a scale with a discrete even number of points, not necessarily 2. I think we were doing 8 on the test I had, so the level of each attribute was something that you also were told to consider. But it's still only 4 dimensions.
I found it somewhat useful as a thinking tool, too, but mainly because it drew attention to something, gave a little bit more structure to the analysis. But you have to be careful not to overgeneralize with it. OTOH, management is often struggling in the dark, with soft squishy overgeneralized ideas at all times, so you tend to latch onto what you can.
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Hard News: Jonesing, in reply to Keir Leslie,
But that seems to be what’s getting Bradbury off, and he’s not the only one. Look at the Standard and the Daily Blog
There's truth in that. But they have no power. Soon, they'll probably finally have Cunliffe and the rivers will not flow with milk and honey. Hopefully the baying for blood dies down as the guy knuckles down for the campaign.
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Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to izogi,
I’m wondering if you mean something like the Keirsey Temperament Sorter
No, I meant MBTI. It was part of management training. We did the test, then got trained on how to interpret it, over a couple of days (amongst other training). But they didn't interpret it for us, the aim was to get us to understand what it might mean for ourselves, and also to get the limitations. It made sense, because pitching it like it was actually some kind of test that had to be passed, would have lost pretty much all the value that I could see in it. It wasn't for screening purposes, but training purposes.
I researched it quite a bit before and afterward as well just to know what I was getting in for. It's an interesting idea. But, as Bart says above, minds are pretty damned complex things, and trying to cluster them in 4 dimensions leads to massive simplifications. Add another dimension, and you can find people who are in the same one of the 16 MB categories might be poles apart. Why choose those 4? The division between the ideas was not really that clear, nor do they comprehensively cover the ways we learn and interact. Also, they can be highly situational - a person can go from introvert to extrovert in the right context, so it's really rather arbitrary to just sum them up as an extrovert for answering that they're comfortable in enough situation associated with extroversion. MB's idea of what extroversion even meant was rather idiosyncratic - it's "draws energy from other people, rather than from themselves". What about people who draw energy from something else altogether, or just seem to have an unlimited supply, or no supply? Or they draw it only from specific people, whom they are always around? And what is this energy anyway?
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Oh, and of course Assad will have missiles too, but it would be an extremely ballsy move to attempt to strike at one of the American ships. Even shooting at the American planes would be something that was thought carefully, especially if they are just circling ominously, encroaching bit by bit into the airspace.
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Simon Grigg,
I wasn't suggesting air to air combat, which is what the whole detail about tracking them back to landing points was about. By homing missiles I meant surface to air, or possibly air-to-air, which would be a response to their aircraft attempting, say, to attack one of the ships that is launching missiles.
Once the jets have dispersed then you can use all the pre-programmed coordinates, satellites and spotters you like and they’ll do little.
Dispersed to where? Once they're in the air they're on radar, then you can quite literally just watch them from a satellite, so long as it's not cloudy (which is when you'd begin your attack). There's still no such thing as an actual invisible jet, nor a cold one so they can be pretty much watched to where they land, and picked off on the ground.
I'm curious what you mean by the Swedish model, with no infrastructure. You mean no radar installations at all? How do they see any kind of incoming aircraft then?
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Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to Lilith __,
That’s fascinating!
Yes, it's sort of goes to my point about people near the middle roving between opposites, but I'd never really thought through that most people are near the middle. So most people can switch reasonably easily between any of the 16 types! But perhaps it does have some merit when people are more extreme in one or other dimension.
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Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to tim oliver,
In short, not getting a job because a dumb test thinks you have the wrong personality, and then being told this is a ‘good outcome’ for you, is the most infuriating thing I can imagine.
It might be a good outcome if the boss was a dick.
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